Haley Stewart is an editor at Word on Fire, an author of The Grace of Enough, Jane Austen's Genius Guide to Life, and the Sister Serafina Mysteries.

She has edited a new book with the title Women of the Catholic Imagination, 12 inspired novelist, You Should Know.

That's our topic today. Welcome, Ms. Stewart.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right. Well, you disclose something much for having me. All right.

Well, you disclose something at the beginning.

A novel changed your life.

What novel was that?

How did that happen?

Sure.

So it was Brideshead Revisited by Yvonneois, and it was my senior year in college.

I was raised in a Protestant Christian home and then found myself kind of grappling with the early church fathers and different things I was being

exposed to during college was kind of helping me reconsider some of my misconceptions about the Catholic

Church. But really, a turning point for me was reading this novel and the way it presented

sacrament and grace and something just clicked due to the story. And I think was the real shift that started me on this journey to the Catholic Church.

A novel.

And you actually note a curious fact about this experience that if the deathbed scene, say, in that novel that struck you so hard were

presented in more argumentative, discursive, doctrinal form, not in a dramatic, fictive, novelistic

form, it may not have had the same impact.

How is the novel a special presentation of these things?

What does it do in its own way?

Well, I think that as human beings, we are wired to learn through story and narrative in a special way. And this is why Jesus tells his disciples parables. He tells them stories, knowing that this is a way we're designed to learn and to

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